Marcus Camby Is Back Playing Full Tilt For Umass. But His Scary Collapse Is Still A . . .

Mysterious `Episode'

March 05, 1996|By Skip Myslenski, Tribune College Basketball Writer.

LOUISVILLE — Marcus Camby, the Massachusetts center, props himself against a wall in the basement of Louisville's Freedom Hall. All is well with him now, he has just proved that with a truly All-American performance in his Minutemen's victory over the Cardinals.

"He's as good as there is around," Louisville coach Denny Crum says. "He can score; it doesn't matter if he's inside or outside. He can block shots. He can rebound. He can make passes. He's just a heck of a basketball player. He's obviously one of the top players in the country. He's good. Let's just leave it there."

Yet it cannot be left there in the wake of what Camby refers to as "my episode." He is weary of discussing it, but it is too much a part of his season's story.

"I don't really think about it at all," he says evenly. "I just try to take things in stride. I just go out there and try to play my hardest and make plays."

How scared were you back then?

"I wasn't all that scared," Camby says. "Once I came through, I felt physically fine. I think staying in the hospital made me more sick. But nothing bad really crossed my mind. I was just anxious to get back out there and play again."

Camby was getting ready to play at St. Bonaventure on Jan. 14. He had just completed his warmups and six minutes remained until the game would start. But as Camby walked toward his team's locker room, he suddenly, inexplicably, collapsed.

"I was scared," remembers teammate Donta Bright. "I was standing next to him in the hallway, and he was kind of holding his head and the side of his face when he just suddenly fell. As soon as it happened, I ran out and got word back to one of the coaches and one of the trainers."

It took eight men to load the 6-foot-11-inch, 220-pound Camby into an ambulance, which quickly took him and coach John Calipari to Olean General Hospital. There, as Camby was examined, Calipari wandered into a waiting room, where he was soon recognized by a stranger. The stranger, thinking Calipari would like to watch UMass' game, turned the waiting room's television to it. "Turn the TV off, please," Calipari immediately thought.

"I was praying," he recalls now. "I was thinking about him. I did not want to think about basketball right then. At that point, no one had told me what the deal was. When I went back in about 45 minutes later, they said, `He's fine, coach. There's no danger, no life-threatening danger.' That was just like we'd won a national title.

"You may not understand. But it would be like you didn't know whether your child's living or dying, and then someone's saying, `He's going to live.' At that point, I did not know if he'd ever play basketball again. But I knew he was going to live, and my whole thing at that point was, `Please, just live.' "

Camby, in fact, felt just fine by that point, and soon he was up in his hospital bed and watching replays of his episode on television. He remembered none of it, he says now, that is how quickly it occurred, and so as he watched, he says, "It just didn't seem real."

Then, after their victory over St. Bonaventure, his teammates visited him, and he joked with them, questioned them, declared that he wanted to join them for the trip home to Amherst. He wouldn't; he would spend this night in the hospital and undergo more tests, but the next morning, as he headed for a medivac flight home, he declared, "I feel great. I'm anxious to get back out on the court."

He would first undergo an endless series of exams that never did find the cause of his mysterious collapse. Through all this probing Camby's impatience only grew, he just wanted to play again, and finally, a mere 13 days after his episode, he did, starting for Massachusetts as it played host to, coincidentally enough, St. Bonaventure.

"I felt like it was my freshman year all over again," is how he remembers that start, but he hardly played like a freshman, scoring 19 points and blocking nine shots and grabbing seven rebounds in 26 minutes. With that he was emphatically back, and now his concerns returned only to the mundane, to things like basketball and his Minutemen and their quest for the national title.

Back in November at the Great 8 tournament, Massachusetts handed Kentucky its lone loss of the season. But now, as that regular season rushed toward its close, Camby and the team were struggling. Back in November, when he stamped himself as a leading candidate for national player of the year, opponents were searching for ways to stop him. But now, as the NCAA tourney approached, opponents knew to play him physically.

These are his current concerns, not his episode or the days that followed.

"As soon as I cross half-court, guys are grabbing me, banging me and bumping me and trying to get me off my spot," Camby says. "It gets really frustrating, but I have to keep my head up.

"Before games I'm so hyped up that usually in the first two minutes I have to sub for myself. I'm just going out there being crazy. Kind of losing it. I just need to calm down a little bit."

Are you trying to prove something to people?

"I still have a lot to prove," Marcus Camby finally says. "One of my goals at the beginning of the year was to win player of the year. So I still want to go out there and have a strong showing. People are still saying a lot of guys are better than me, so every time I step on the court against a great center, I try to do my best.

"I took on challengers all year, and I'm still the same person, the same ballplayer I was before I had my episode. Nothing much has changed. I just want to help my team win the national title."